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3,100 Miles to Nowhere Suzy Weiss

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Fourteen runners attempt to hit 3,100 miles in 52 days in an effort to do an even harder thing. (All photos by Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The Free Press)

Down 84th Avenue in Jamaica, Queens, around the four blocks that circle Thomas A. Edison Career and Technical Education High School, 14 people are running 3,100 miles in an attempt to do an even harder thing: transcend themselves. 

“It’s a spiritual journey,” Jason Lester, the only American runner taking part, tells me during his 50th lap of the 33rd day of the 52-day race. 

I’m wheezing, trying to keep up with him and Adrian Papuc, who came to Queens from Romania. I’m far too late in the game and far too out of shape—I ran high school cross-country, but was the slowest on the team and once lost a trail race to a girl on crutches—but I’m not past trying to achieve some measure of inner peace, especially these days. Even if it means getting up early on a Sunday to take the train, then a bus, to jog around a high school. 

When I ask Lester why he thinks he’s the lone U.S. citizen he retorts, “I don’t see myself as an American. We’re all one.”

“The goal of this is to bring humanity together, and stop having these borders,” he explains. “There’s no way that we’re gonna be one in any of our issues that we have until we take those walls down.” 

Lester, who has a tattoo on his arm that reads “Never give up,” is not a disciple of Sri Chinmoy, the Bengali guru and meditation teacher who settled in Queens and started this race 27 years ago, but most everyone else here is. 

The Sri Chinmoy Self-Transcendence 3100 Mile Race is branded as the world’s longest certified footrace. Its distance honors the fact that Chinmoy was born in 1931. (Why they don’t just run 1,931 miles is painfully unclear.) The disciple-runners come from the Czech Republic, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, New Zealand, Ukraine, Russia, and Italy. 

The rules of the race are simple. Runners must arrange for lodging within a half mile of the course, so that they can be picked up before 6 a.m. by race organizers and taken to the start line. The course is open from six to midnight for participants to run as far and as fast as they can in that time, for 52 days, with the hope that they will get to 3,100 miles. That means they have to average 59.6 miles per day. When I visit, only half of this year’s 14 runners are on track to get there. 

The guru Sri Chinmoy.

Bipin Larkin, 67, one of the race directors, discovered Sri Chinmoy in 1972. He listened to the music of Carlos Santana and John McLaughlin, who were followers of Chinmoy; they were given the Sanskrit names Devadip and Mahavishnu, respectively. By 1975, Larkin was a disciple, which means he meditates twice weekly at one of the group’s centers, he’s a vegetarian, and he never married nor had kids. 

“Sports is part of it,” says Larkin, who himself has run seventeen marathons and five longer ultra-marathons. “The guru believed that the physical body was like a temple for the soul. You practice your inner life and your outer life.” He calls the 3,100-mile race “an extreme dimension of it.” We’re interrupted by an older woman volunteer—“Wei-Ming is about to finish 2,100!”—and we grab bells from a Tupperware container to ring and scream when the Taiwanese man approaches. One of the women starts to laugh with delight. 

Celebrating the runner Harita Davies for her 2,100 miles.

The Chinmoy group has been accused of being a cult, and the guru—who died in 2007, though people here prefer to say he “left” or “departed this spiritual plane”—aroused suspicion with some of his own incredible physical feats, like lifting an airplane. But the vibe in Queens is more turkey trot on crack and less self-imposed ascetic torture. 

The buff guys from a local Queens baseball league stare, stretching their backs with their bats as the cadre of middle-aged runners shuffles around the park, in the corner of the rectangular route, and past the field they play in. “You see them going all day, even when it’s pouring,” says Jessica Araujo, who is at the field to watch her boyfriend play baseball. “Some of them aren’t even wearing shoes.” 

It’s true: Wei-Ming prefers sandals. The ones who do wear shoes are known to go through a pair every week or so. They prop their run-through shoes against a fence by the timekeepers’ tent, under a life-size shot of the guru. 

The race is a show of sporting prowess that rivals the World Cup, the Olympics, and the Super Bowl. It takes running into the realm of performance art, and is a testament to the power of the mind over the body. It’s also completely nuts. 

Wen-Ya Tsai post-mile number 2,373, running in sandals.

“You have energy points here, and also here,” Vajra Hinderson, 81, a Chinmoy disciple, tells me while digging his hands into the chest and shoulders of Vasu Duzhiy, 57, who came in fourth place last year has been averaging 61 miles per day for the past 33 days. We’re in the medical tent. Another volunteer is massaging coconut oil onto Vasu’s feet. Hinderson moves to the midsection. “You create a vortex of energy around this area here and it goes in and helps with the digestive system.” 

Vajra Hinderson working on a runner.

On a table under two pictures of Sri Chinmoy—one of him running, another in which he’s staring straight ahead, eyes half-closed—sit a roll of kinesiology tape, scissors, a knife, a bottle of sesame oil, and a cabbage. Hinderson points to one of the portraits of the guru: “That’s my boss,” he says. “Even though he’s not in the physical body now, when I look at him and I’m thinking of him, that energy routes through me into him,” he continues, gesturing toward Vasu. 

Another disciple, Garima Hoffman, 75, came in from San Francisco to man the food tent. “I move the cookies back when the kids get let out from school,” she tells me, swatting bees away from the Oreos, yogurt parfaits, bagels, and ginger carrot soup that she’s laid out. 

Volunteers laying out food for the runners—who collectively consume between 40,000 and 60,000 per day—along the race course.

It’s 10 a.m., and already the runners have gone through six sticks of butter, which are cut up into chunks on a plate for them to fork up. I’m told that calorie intake is one of the most important factors to keeping up an average of 60 miles per day. The 14 runners collectively consume between 40,000 and 60,000 per day. After my own four laps, the equivalent of two miles, I eat a cheese blintz, half of an everything bagel with cream cheese, a quarter of a sesame bagel with cream cheese, a Dixie cup of green tea, and a mozzarella stick to stay safe. 

The runner Harita Davies by the leaderboard.

I caught up with Andrea Marcato, 41, for his 56th and 57th laps of the day. Marcato was born in Venice but works in Switzerland at a company that makes meat alternatives; he was a lifelong spiritual seeker and was “looking for ways to calm my mind” when he first visited a Sri Chinmoy center in Italy. This is the fourth time he’s run the 3,100 miles, and he’s in first place. (He’s since finished and won the race, with a time of 43 days,13 hours 33 minutes and 23 seconds.)

“It’s a very simple life. You eat, run, and sleep,” says Marcato. His life has been pared down to these four blocks, plus dealing with things like blisters, his nutrition, and rain. He doesn’t have time to read the news, but he asked a man who had come to run a few solidarity laps, a common occurrence especially when the weather is good, to give him the big picture. “He told me that the U.S. government almost shut down, and that the war in Ukraine is still going on and they’re sending more weapons.” (This was before war in the Middle East broke out, but after Trump was indicted in New York.) “He told me Trump is getting impeached or something.” 

“It’s a very simple life. You eat, run, and sleep,” says runner Andrea Marcato.

Gesiane Nascimento, 40, who came from São Paulo, Brazil, to help keep time for the runners, is hoping she can qualify for the race someday. To do that, she’ll have to clock 450 miles in a six-day race, which is also put on by the Sri Chinmoy Marathon Team. “We need to live in society, and live with the problems of the world and feel it,” she tells me as we hustle around the high school campus, cars whizzing past us on the Grand Central Parkway. “If each person feels oneness, we won’t need war. You’ll feel the other with your heart.” 

Susan Marshall tends to her feet in her van, parked along the race course.

Nascimento takes a break for a prasad, a food offering that’s been presented to a picture of the guru, and is thus consecrated by him, of Entenmann’s pumpkin donuts and cherry tomatoes. A tatted-up local guy called Mike Marin, a building superintendent, here with his long-haired spaniel named Mikey—“Don’t laugh, it’s true!”—says the race inspires him to push himself. “I do weights and a little cardio.” 

He and Mikey come to watch every day. “I was like, what’s going on? It’s a spiritual and physical challenge. Some people are running in sandals. I think it’s great.” 

“It’s all by the grace of Sri Chinmoy,” one of the runner’s helpers tells me as we watch Wei-Ming finish 2,100 miles. 

Wen-Ya Tsai’s support area at the race.

Wen-Ya Tsai, 54, another runner from Taiwan (none of the three Taiwanese runners are disciples) is in second place. Her daughter and her son-in-law quit their jobs to come support her, and they’re camped out in folding chairs in front of a trailer with bottles of soybean milk and bouquets of flowers.

Wen-Ya and every other runner are going around and around the same block, which begs the question: after 3,100 miles, where does she hope to get? Szu-Han Lin, Wen-Ya’s daughter, shrugs. “She just tries to find a challenge, I think.”

Suzy Weiss is a reporter at The Free Press. Her last feature was about the short-lived loosening of the Senate dress code. 

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November 11, 2024 Heather Cox Richardson

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The day after Donald Trump won the 2024 presidential election, Afghanistan’s Taliban offered its congratulations to the American people for “not handing leadership of their great country to a woman.” 

Taliban leaders expressed optimism that Trump’s election would enable a new chapter in the history of U.S-Taliban relations. They noted that it was Trump who suggested a new international order when he inked the February 29, 2020, Doha Agreement between the U.S. and the Taliban. That deal cut out the Afghan government and committed the U.S. to leave Afghanistan by May 2021, closing five military bases and ending economic sanctions on the Taliban. This paved the way for the U.S. evacuation of the country in August 2021 and the return of the Taliban to power. 

The Taliban prohibits girls’ education past the sixth grade and recently banned the sound of women’s voices outside their homes.

In Russia, Russian thinker Alexander Dugin explained the dramatic global impact of Trump’s win. “We have won,” Dugin said. “The world will be never ever like before. Globalists have lost their final combat.” Dugin has made his reputation on his calls for an “anti-American revolution” and a new Russian empire built on “the rejection of [alliances of democratic nations surrounding the Atlantic], strategic control of the United States, and the rejection of the supremacy of economic, liberal market values,” as well as reestablishing traditional family structures with strict gender roles. 

Maxim Trudolyubov of the Wilson Center, a nonpartisan foreign affairs think tank, suggested Friday that Putin’s long-term goal of weakening the U.S. has made him more interested in dividing Americans than in any one candidate. 

Indeed, rather than backing Trump wholeheartedly, Russian president Vladimir Putin has been undercutting him. He did not comment on Trump’s election until Thursday, when he said that the power of liberal democracies over world affairs is “irrevocably disappearing.” Although Ellen Nakashima, John Hudson, and Josh Dawsey of the Washington Post reported that Trump and Putin had spoken on Thursday, Putin denied such a call as “pure fiction.”

Exacerbating America’s internal divisions and demonstrating dominance over both the U.S. and Trump might explain why after Trump became president-elect, laughing Russian media figures showed viewers nude pictures of Trump’s third wife, Melania, taken during her modeling career.

In an interview, Putin’s presidential aide Nikolay Patrushev said today: “To achieve success in the election, Donald Trump relied on certain forces to which he has corresponding obligations. As a responsible person, he will be obliged to fulfill them.” Meanwhile, U.S. and Ukrainian officials report that Russia has massed 50,000 soldiers, including North Korean soldiers, to reclaim territory in the Kursk region of Russia taken this year by Ukrainian forces. 

Trump claims to have talked to about seventy world leaders since his reelection but has declined to go through the usual channels of the State Department. This illustrates his determination to reorganize the federal government around himself rather than its normal operations but leaves him—and the United States—vulnerable to misstatements and misunderstandings.

The domestic effects of Trump’s victory also reveal confusion, both within the Republican Party and within national politics. Voters elected Trump and his running mate, Ohio senator J.D. Vance, but it’s hard to miss that billionaire Elon Musk, who backed Trump’s 2024 campaign financially, seems to be “Trump’s shadow vice-president,” as Nick Robins-Early of The Guardian put it. Sources told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins that Musk has been a constant presence at Mar-a-Lago since the election, sitting in on phone calls with foreign leaders and weighing in on staffing decisions. Yesterday at Mar-a-Lago, Musk met with the chief executive officer of the right-wing media channel Newsmax.

Exactly who is in control of the party is unclear, and in the short term that question is playing out over the Senate’s choice of a successor to minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY). In the new Congress, this Republican leader will become Senate majority leader, thereby gaining the power to control the Senate calendar and decide which bills get taken up and which do not. 

Trump controls the majority of Republicans in the House, but he did not control Senate Republicans when McConnell led them. Now he wants to put Florida senator Rick Scott into the leadership role, but Republicans aligned with McConnell and the pre-2016 party want John Thune (R-SD) or John Cornyn (R-TX). There are major struggles taking place over the choice. Today Musk posted on social media his support for Scott. Other MAGA leaders fell in line, with media figure Benny Johnson—recently revealed to be on Russia’s payroll—urging his followers to target senators backing Thune or Cornyn.

Rachael Bade and Eugene Daniels of Politico Playbook suggested that this pressure would backfire, especially since many senators dislike Scott for his unsuccessful leadership of the National Republican Senatorial Committee that works to elect Republicans to the Senate. 

Trump has also tried to sideline senators by demanding they abandon one of their key constitutional roles: that of advice and consent to a president’s appointment of top administration figures. Although Republicans will command a majority in the Senate, Trump is evidently concerned he cannot get some of his appointees through, so has demanded that Republicans agree to let him make recess appointments without going through the usual process of constitutionally mandated advice and consent.

Trump has also demanded that Republicans stop Democrats from making any judicial appointments in the next months, although Republicans continued to approve his nominees after voters elected President Joe Biden in 2020. Indeed, Judge Aileen Cannon, who let Trump off the hook for his retention of classified documents, was approved after Trump had lost the election.

All this jockeying comes amid the fact that while Trump is claiming a mandate from his election, in fact the vote was anything but a landslide. While votes are still being counted, Trump seems to have won by fewer than two percentage points in a cycle where incumbents across the globe lost. This appears to be the smallest popular vote margin for a winning candidate since Richard Nixon won in 1968.

While voters elected Trump, they also backed Democratic policies. In seven states, voters enshrined abortion rights in their constitutions. Two Republican-dominated states raised their minimum wage to $15 an hour; three enshrined mandated paid leave. In exit polls last week, sixty-five percent of voters said they want abortion to remain legal, and fifty-six percent said they want undocumented immigrants to have a chance to apply for legal status.

The gap between what Trump has promised MAGA supporters and what voters want is creating confusion in national politics. How can Trump deliver the national abortion ban MAGAs want when sixty-five percent of voters want abortion rights? How can he deport all undocumented immigrants, including those who have been here for decades and integrated into their communities, while his own voters say they want undocumented immigrants to have a path to citizenship? 

Trump’s people have repeatedly expressed their opinion that Trump was stopped from putting the full MAGA agenda into place because he did not move quickly enough in his first term. They have vowed they will not make that mistake again. But the fast imposition of their extremist policies runs the risk of alienating the more moderate voters who just put them in power.

In September, as the Taliban enforced new rules on women in Afghanistan, they also began to target Afghan men. New laws mandated that men stop wearing western jeans, stop cutting their hair and beards in western ways, and stop looking at women other than their wives or female relatives. Religious morality officers are knocking on the doors of those who haven’t recently attended mosque to remind them they can be tried and sentenced for repeated nonattendance, and government employees are afraid they’ll be fired if they don’t grow their beards. According to Rick Noack of the Washington Post, such restrictions surprised men, who were accustomed to enjoying power in their society. Some have been wondering if they should have spoken up to defend the freedoms of their wives and daughters.

One man who had supported the Taliban said he now feels bullied. “We all are practicing Muslims and know what is mandatory or not. But it’s unacceptable to use force on us,” he said. Speaking on the condition of anonymity because he feared drawing the attention of the regime, another man from Kabul said: “If men had raised their voices, we might also be in a different situation now.”

Notes:

https://www.distractify.com/p/did-the-taliban-congratulate-trump

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/01/16/afghanistan-child-brides/

https://tec.fsi.stanford.edu/docs/aleksandr-dugins-foundations-geopolitics

https://www.wilsoncenter.org/blog-post/us-right-wing-media-embrace-russias-far-right-ideologue

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/11/07/russia-putin-reaction-us-election/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2024/11/10/trump-putin-phone-call-ukraine/

www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/nov/11/kremlin-denies-reports-of-trump-putin-call-about-ukraine-invasion

https://www.wilsoncenter.org/blog-post/kremlin-was-hoping-division-america-not-victory-one-candidate

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/nov/09/elon-musk-trump-administration

https://www.politico.com/playbook

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/11/10/trump-rick-scott-senate-cornyn-thune-mcconnell/

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/10/us/politics/russia-north-korea-troops-ukraine.html

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/09/22/afghanistan-taliban-restrictions-men-beards/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/11/11/trump-victory-red-wave/

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The Five Things President Trump Should Do on Day One Santi Ruiz

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Hire the right bureaucrats, set concrete, ambitious goals, and experiment, experiment, experiment. Santi Ruiz for The Free Press.

Michael Collins checks on technical material while in the Apollo Mission Simulator. (Bettmann via Getty Images)

In a few short weeks, Donald Trump will be sworn in as the 47th president. His transition team will be in charge of a federal government that, in many rudimentary ways, doesn’t work. 

Let’s leave aside partisan gridlock in Congress and turmoil in the judicial branch, and just focus on the executive branch: National Public Data, which aggregates personal information for background checks, was hacked this year, meaning your Social Security number is now floating around on the internet. The IRS is built on mainframes from 1965 and relies on code from JFK’s administration that no one’s learning anymore. The pandemic highlighted our broken systems: In January 2020, the Food and Drug Administration effectively banned private companies from rolling out their own Covid tests because the CDC was developing their own. But the CDC tests turned out to be defective, leaving the U.S. flying blind until private companies could rush in and pick up the slack.

For the past year, I’ve run an interview series called Statecraft where I talk with civil servants to understand how the federal sausage actually gets made. These men and women serve in a variety of roles, such as running a CIA base in Afghanistan, investigating Soviet anthrax leaks, and redesigning Department of Labor job centers. The best of them have managed to deliver good outcomes for the American people by working around the worst ingrained practices of the federal bureaucracy, and they have lessons for reformers eager to make the federal government go. 

But changing the culture of a machine this size takes time. Despite the fact he will have a Republican House and Senate, and the allyship of Elon Musk, who seems eager to head his own Department of Government Efficiency, Trump faces the same broken federal machinery—and will face many of the same problems, and the shot clock to solve them—that Biden did. 

To help make the government more efficient and effective instantly, the Trump team should prioritize the following:

Hire Bureaucrats, Just Make Them the Right Ones 

Progressives fear Trump’s vision for civil service reform, Schedule F, which would reclassify many civil servants to make them easier to fire. They worry Schedule F would gut executive branch agencies—which includes the Environmental Protection Agency, the Departments of Education, State, Justice, et al.—of their talent, and consolidate power in the White House. 

But even liberals like Jen Pahlka, former deputy chief technology officer of America under President Obama, have pointed out that “managing out” a poor performer can be a full-time job for political appointees. Firing an executive branch civil servant requires extensive documentation. Additionally, many employees are unionized, and all can appeal their firings internally. Partially as a result, the government cans bad employees about four times less often than the private sector does. It takes a lot more than saying “you’re fired” to get people out the door. 

It’s also impossible to hire new, better civil servants. Our systems for sourcing are shattered. Take Jack Cable, 17, who won the Department of Defense’s “Hack the Air Force” contest against 600 other contestants by identifying weaknesses in Pentagon software. But when Cable applied for a DoD role, his résumé was graded “not minimally qualified” because the hiring manager didn’t know anything about the coding languages he listed himself proficient in. Or take the Federal Aviation Administration, which has been screening prospective air traffic controllers for how many sports they played in high school in an effort to meet its racial quotas.

A strategic administration will encourage agencies to find creative ways to bring in top talent. It could try using new tools to assess technically talented applicants in bulk, or it could increase the number of academic rotations through the Intergovernmental Personnel Act, which allows academics to contribute part-time to special federal agency projects. The Office of Personnel Management can and should encourage more aggressive use of Direct Hire Authority, allowing agencies to avoid certain procedural steps of the federal hiring process.


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Could a Trump Presidency Cost Columbia University $3.5 Billion? Frannie Block

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Could a Trump Presidency Cost Columbia University $3.5 Billion?

Columbia University. (Raymond Boyd via Getty Images)

A group of alumni and former professors of Columbia University warn in a new report that the university could stand to lose up to $3.5 billion a year—or up to 55 percent of the university’s annual operating budget—if Columbia doesn’t start enforcing its rules and cracking down on campus rule-breaking. 

The report, published by Stand Columbia Society, a “politically neutral” collective working to restore Columbia’s “rightful pre-eminence in American—and global—higher education,” states the potential financial risks to the university are rooted in Trump and other Republican officials’ “enmity for elite institutions in general, and our alma mater in particular.” 

Alexandra Zubko, a 1999 graduate of Columbia and member of Stand Columbia, told The Free Press that the group published the Institutional Risk Exposure report because “we don’t want Columbia to be made an example of.” 

The report estimates what might happen if the incoming Trump administration were to accuse universities like Columbia of violating Title VI, the section of the Civil Rights Act that prohibits discrimination of “race, color, or national origin in programs and activities receiving federal financial assistance,” which would allow the administration to withhold federal funding.

At present, Columbia has at least three active Title VI investigations into antisemitism and anti-Muslim sentiment on campus. Since October 7, 2023, Columbia’s campus has been embroiled in chaotic demonstrations against the State of Israel, prompting the House Committee on Education and the Workforce to conclude in a recent report that the university was “the site of some of the most disturbing and extreme antisemitic conduct violations in the country.” 

Put another way, Stand Columbia Society predicts that Republicans may force “an uncomfortable reckoning that we can no longer wish away.” That reckoning—which Stand Columbia believes is possible, if not probable—could potentially cost the university up to $1.33 billion in government grants and contracts that it currently receives, including around $800 million dedicated solely for research.

And it’s not only federal grants that the university could lose if it is found in violation of Title VI. 


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